Part of the process of shopping around for a used car is performing various inspections, including checking for damage. Consequently, part of the allure of buying a brand new car is, at least in theory, that you can skip that part, and don’t have to worry about anything being wrong with the vehicle. No previous owners…
Source: LifeHacker – Don’t Assume a Brand New Car Has No Damage
The World Science Fiction Society “administers and presents the Hugo Awards, the oldest and most noteworthy award for science fiction,” according to Wikipedia. Its members vote on each year’s winners, and this year they received 1,847 nominating ballots.
This year the 81st edition of their World Science Fiction Convention was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. More details from Gizmodo:
While fan-favorite cozy fantasy novel Legends & Lattes lost Best Novel to T. Kingfisher’s excellent horror-fantasy Nettle & Bone, Legends & Lattes author Travis Baldtree won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Everything Everywhere All at Once snagged film’s top honor, and The Expanse’s finale episode did the same for televsion, beating out both nominated Andor episodes among others. Some other great standouts include short fiction editor Neil Clarke, who has kept Clarkesworld magazine running despite getting swamped by AI-generated submissions earlier this year.
And “By winning Best Graphic Story or Comic, [Bartosz] Sztybor-who also served as a producer on the overwhelmingly popular Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-also becomes the first Polish author to win a Hugo,” reports Forbes:
[Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams] is set in Night City-as seen in Cyberpunk 2077-and follows the story of two small-time thieves, Tasha and Mirek, who are trying to survive the harsh metropolis together. “Tasha and Mirek make a living for themselves stealing cyberware and indulging in parties and braindances,” the official teaser explains…
Other highlights from this year’s awards:
Best novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
Best Novelette: “The Space-Time Painter”, by Hai Ya (Galaxy’s Edge, April 2022)
Best Short Story: “Rabbit Test”, by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022)
Best Series: Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – 81st World Science Fiction Convention Announces 2023 Hugo Awards
A shiny feature landed on Friday for the Intel open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within Mesa 24.0: Tile-Based Immediate Mode Rendering (TBIMR)…
Source: Phoronix – Intel’s Mesa Drivers Enable “TBMIR” Tile-Based Rendering
Actor Charles Richard Moll passed away on Friday at the age of 80.
Source: Gizmodo – Richard Moll, Batman Animated’s Harvey Dent, Has Died at Age 80
Marine biologists discovered two pristine deep-sea coral reefs off the coast of the Galápagos islands this week, one of which is over eight football fields long. The reefs sit between 370 and 420 meters below the surface, and their discovery expands our understanding of deep, cold-water reefs in the Galápagos Marine…
Source: Gizmodo – Thriving Deep-Sea Coral Reefs Discovered Near the Galápagos
There’s nothing we like more than surprises, especially when they are accompanied by potential new products from Apple. This October 30th at 5pm Pacific Time, we have an unusually timed night event. Apple plans to hold its “Scary Fast” announcements for its lineup of Mac computers. It will be streamed on their website as an online event, unlike
Source: Hot Hardware – Apple’s Scary Fast October Event Looms Near, Here’s What To Expect
It seems like every few days we’re getting interesting tidbits about NVIDIA’s possible upcoming graphics card lineup. No, we’re not yet at the GeForce RTX 50 series – but looking at the “Super” variants instead. The well-known leaker kopite7kimi has revealed a potentially interesting set of specs for these GPUs.
If you’re unfamiliar with
Source: Hot Hardware – Alleged NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super, 4070 Ti Super, 4070 Super Specs Revealed
VentureBeat reports:
Thursday San Francisco-based Oxide, a startup founded by computing experts from Joyent and Dell, launched what it calls the world’s first “commercial cloud computer,” a rack-scale system that enterprises can own to reap the benefits and flexibility of cloud computing on-premises, right within their data center. The company believes the new offering can finally put an end to the “cloud vs on-prem” dilemma enterprises face while setting up their infrastructure…
It also announced $44 million in a series A round of funding, led by Eclipse VC with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and Rally Ventures. Oxide plans to use this money to accelerate the adoption of its cloud computer, giving teams a new, better option to serve their customers… The round brings Oxide’s total financing raised to date to $78 million.
Since 2019 Oxide has thrown a team of 60 technologists at the problem — and Thursday, Oxide also revealed an impressive list of current customers:
There’s the U.S. Department of Energy — specifically its Idaho National Laboratory (which has historically been involved in nuclear research) — as well as “a well-known financial services firm”. Oxide also announced that within just a few months, there’ll be additional installments at multiple Fortune 1000 companies. And beyond that, Oxide is also boasting that they now have “a long wait list of customers ready to install once production catches up with demand….”
Will Coffield, a partner at Riot Ventures, quipped that Oxide had “essentially wrapped all the hopes and dreams of a software engineer, IT manager, and a CFO into a single box….” Steve Tuck, CEO and co-founder of Oxide, pointed out that cloud computing “remains restricted to a centralized, rental-only model.” There are many reasons why an enteprise might want to own their infrastructure — security, reliability, cost, and response time/latency issues — and as Tuck sees it, “the rental-only model has denied them modern cloud capabilities for these use cases.
“We are changing that.”
Earlier this year on the Software Engineering Daily podcast, CTO/co-founder Bryan Cantrill remembered that when doing their compliance testing, “The folks at the compliance lab — they see a lot of servers — and they’re like, ‘Are you sure it’s on?’ Because it’s so quiet!” (This June article notes that later on the podcast Cantrill argued that the acoustics of today’s data centers are “almost like an odor. It is this visceral reminder that this domain has suffered for lack of real systemic holistic thinking…”)
Oxide’s press packet lays out other advantages for their servers. “Power usage is 2x efficient, takes up half the space, and can be up and running in just four hours instead of three months.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Oxide Launches the World’s First ‘Commercial’ Cloud Computer
Though Android 14 may be Google’s baby, it does not appear to be playing nice with Google’s Pixel phone lineup. On Reddit and in Google’s issue tracker, users who upgraded to Android 14 on Pixel devices are reporting that they are losing all data after their phones get soft-bricked by the update in a “ransomware-esque” fashion. The only connecting
Source: Hot Hardware – Alarming Android 14 Storage Bug Locks Users Out Of Phones, Which Pixels Are At Risk
There’s no shortage of horror movies on all the streaming services, but for those who prefer their nightmares tinged with reality, we have some suggestions of where to start. These documentaries and docuseries, all released within the past year or so, dig into history and beyond headlines to unearth crimes, mysteries,…
Source: Gizmodo – 10 Eerie Recent Documentaries to Stream for Halloween
eza is a modern, maintained replacement for ls, built on exa. It has some new features such as hyperlink support. Let’s check out eza.
Source: LXer – Excellent Utilities: eza – replacement for ls
When it comes to common household tasks that require a lubricant, many people reach for products like petroleum jelly (e.g. Vaseline), cooking oil spray, or WD-40. And while they’re often effective—at least temporarily—some projects could benefit from silicone grease. Here’s what to know about the lubricant and when…
Source: LifeHacker – Here’s When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Silicone Grease for Household Projects
PC Magazine cites a study done in March by Recurrent, a Seattle-based company that analyzes used electric car batteries, which analyzed real-world telematics data from 15,000 EVs of various makes and models, taking daily readings of their actual charging activity, battery percentage, and estimated range. Their results?
Electric vehicles typically come with a standard battery warranty, between eight and 12 years, plus a certain number of miles. Recurrent found that most drivers were not replacing their batteries even after those warranties expired. The oldest models in the study have the highest percentage of battery replacements, at about 5% for those that have been on the road for nine to 12 years, according to the graph below. Twelve years is the current average lifespan for gas-powered cars in the US, according to Progressive.
This suggests a battery replacement could come at a natural time to consider buying a new vehicle or replacing the battery on the current one, not as an unfortunate surprise just a few years into ownership… “Almost all of the batteries we’ve ever made are still in cars, and we’ve been selling electric cars for 12 years,” says Nic Thomas, marketing director for Nissan.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – How Long Do EV Batteries Last? Longer Than You Might Think, Research Suggests
Back when when Hollywood was remaking 80s films at a reliable clip, Highlander was one of those that seemed to just be eternally on the docket. The last substantial piece of news about it was that former Superman/Witcher Henry Cavill was attached to it, and that was back in 2021. A lot has changed a lot in the past…
Source: Gizmodo – Highlander’s Henry Cavill-Led Reboot May Be Alive and Kicking Again
Threads was missing a lot of features users would expect from a service similar to Twitter’s (now X’s) when it launched. Over the past few months, however, it has been been rolling out more and more new features to give users a more robust experience, including polls, an easy way to post GIFs and the ability to quote posts on the web. Still, since it doesn’t have an API, third-party developers can’t conjure features specific to their services that would make the social network a more integral part of people’s everyday lives. An example of that is local transportation agencies being able to automatically post service alerts when a train is delayed. According to Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, though, Threads is working on an API for developers — he just has concerns about how it’s going to be used.
As first reported by TechCrunch, Mosseri responded to a conversation on the platform about having a TweetDeck-like experience for Threads. In a response to a user saying that Threads has no API yet, the executive said: “We’re working on it.” He added that he’s concerned that the API’s launch could mean “a lot more publisher content and not much more creator content,” but he’s aware that it “seems like something [the company needs] to get done.”
Mosseri previously said that Threads won’t amplify news, which may have been disappointing to hear for publishers and readers looking to leave X. Instead, he said, Threads wants to “empower creators in general.” More recently, in an AMA he posted on the platform, Mosseri said that that his team’s long-term aspiration is for Threads to become “the de facto platform for public conversations online,” which means being both culturally relevant and big in terms of user size. He said he believes Threads has a chance of surpassing X, but he knows that his service has a long way to go. For now, he keeps his team focused on making people’s experience better week by week.
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Threads has “just under” 100 million monthly active users. Like Mosseri, he is optimistic about its future and said that there’s a “good chance” it could reach 1 billion users over the next couple of years.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-head-says-threads-is-working-on-an-api-for-developers-140049094.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Instagram head says Threads is working on an API for developers
A dog is man’s best friend, or in the case of Boston Dynamic’s robot dog Spot, everyone’s best tour guide. The company utilized ChatGPT to create multiple personalities for Spot that uses a Virtual Question Answering (VQA) model or captioning model to describe various objects in the environment, and then elaborate on those descriptions using
Source: Hot Hardware – Zoinks Scoob! Boston Dynamics Spot Robot Dog Just Learned To Talk With ChatGPT
Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don’t appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features…
Source: Phoronix – Six Great Features With The Upcoming Linux 6.6 Kernel
If you’re a frequent visitor of our site, then you may have caught our all-out PC build guide for playing Alan Wake 2 at max settings. One thing we didn’t touch on, however, is the display—we kept the focus on the game’s bone-crunching hardware requirements, particularly at the high end. It’s an expensive build for sure, which is all the more
Source: Hot Hardware – Dell’s Sweet 34-Inch 144Hz Curved Gaming Monitor Is Available On A Killer Deal
The iRobot Roomba Combo j7+ is the top 2-in-1 pick in our guide to the best robot vacuums, as it adds a retractable mop for cleaning hard floors onto a powerful robovac for carpets and other surfaces. It’s expensive at its usual list price of $1,000, but right now you can get it for $699 at Wellbots. Just use the code ENGROOMBA300 at checkout. While that’s still far from cheap, it does mark the largest discount we’ve tracked.
The Roomba Combo j7+ is undoubtedly a luxury purchase, but we found its vacuuming and mopping capabilities to mostly work as advertised. As a robot vacuum, it offers strong suction power, accurate home mapping and intelligent obstacle avoidance, including a strong knack for avoiding pet waste. In its “vacuum and mop” mode, it’s smart enough to know when it’s rolling over hard floors instead of carpet, then only mop the former. The battery generally lasts between 90 to 180 minutes depending on how often you mop, and the whole thing works with Alexa and the Google Assistant. This model also comes with a (noisy) self-emptying base station, which the vacuum automatically retreats to when it’s done cleaning.
It’s not perfect: You’ll have to refill the water tank fairly often, there’s no mop-only mode and the mopping functionality isn’t as efficient as just using a Swiffer. iRobot’s Home app remains easy to use, but all robovacs require the occasional maintenance and intervention. Still, a device like this makes cleaning more hands-off than it’d be otherwise, so the Combo j7+ could be worth it if your home has a mix of carpet, hardwood, laminate and other surfaces. For more details, check out Engadget Senior Editor Daniel Cooper’s write-up of his experience with the device. Just note that, like many robot vacuums with obstacle avoidance, the j7+ comes with a built-in camera. That may raise privacy concerns for some, particularly with Amazon in the process of acquiring iRobot.
A couple of less expensive Roomba 2-in-1s are also on sale. The Roomba Combo j5+ is down to $499 with the same ENGROOMBA300 code, while the standard Roomba Combo j5 is available for $349 with the code ENGROOMBA250. Those are $300 and $250 discounts, respectively, and both represent all-time lows. The Combo j5+ is a newer midrange alternative to the Combo j7+: It has most of the same features, but it lacks the j7+’s retractable mop arm and ability to automatically avoid carpets while mopping. Instead, you have to swap in a vacuum-only bin (or just move your rugs) when you want to clean a carpeted room. You also have to empty its vacuum/mop combo bin manually. The standard j5 is essentially the same device but doesn’t come with a self-emptying base station.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/irobots-roomba-combo-vacuum-and-mops-are-up-to-300-off-right-now-130031081.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – iRobot’s Roomba Combo vacuum-and-mops are up to 0 off right now
Abner Li reports via 9to5Google: Google today detailed its research into audioplethysmography (APG) that adds heart rate sensing capabilities to active noise canceling (ANC) headphones and earbuds “with a simple software upgrade.” Google says the “ear canal [is] an ideal location for health sensing” given that the deep ear artery “forms an intricate network of smaller vessels that extensively permeate the auditory canal.”
This audioplethysmography approach works by “sending a low intensity ultrasound probing signal through an ANC headphone’s speakers. This signal triggers echoes, which are received via on-board feedback microphones. We observe that the tiny ear canal skin displacement and heartbeat vibrations modulate these ultrasound echoes.” A model that Google created works to process that feedback into a heart rate reading, as well as heart rate variability (HRV) measurement. This technique works even with music playing and “bad earbuds seals.” However, it was impacted by body motion, and Google countered with a multi-tone approach that serves as a calibration tool to “find the best frequency that measures heart rate, and use only the best frequency to get high-quality pulse waveform.”
Google performed two sets of studies with 153 people that found APG “achieves consistently accurate heart rate (3.21% median error across participants in all activity scenarios) and heart rate variability (2.70% median error in inter-beat interval) measurements.” Compared to existing HR sensors, it’s not impacted by skin tones. Ear canal size and “sub-optimal seal conditions” also do not impact accuracy. Google believes this is a better approach than putting traditional photoplethysmograms (PPG) and electrocardiograms (ECG) sensors, as well as a microcontroller, in headphones/earbuds: “this sensor mounting paradigm inevitably adds cost, weight, power consumption, acoustic design complexity, and form factor challenges to hearables, constituting a strong barrier to its wide adoption.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Google Can Turn ANC Earbuds Into a Heart Rate Monitor With No Extra Hardware